I just spent the last couple of days reading every post in this thread, and I want to pull the trigger, but I've got a lot of questions, mostly about the driver.
How do I know what specs I need for my driver? I'm undecided between Meijiu/Hansion, and 288/304 led boards. If someone could link to their preferred board that would be awesome. I'm planning to buy four boards at under 400watts total. I'm hoping this can match, or beat the 400w HIDs I've been looking at.
I see lots of people talking about running the LEDs at lower wattage to increase their efficiency, but I aside from maybe adding a dimmer I really wouldn't know what I'm doing.
How necessary are heat sinks? Some people say get them, some people say don't bother. Lots of people seem to be using aluminum u channel, but I don't think I have the means to drill/cut it for use as a mount/heat sink.
I'm looking at Hansion and their page says "We need your PCB Gerber file,board thickness,copper thickness,surface finishing and quantity to quote you." I really don't have knowledge in any of these areas, what am I suppose to ask for?
People say that the lm561c is significantly more efficient than HID, but with 1152 leds on samsung's calculator I get 59652lm / 339.5w = 175.7lm/w. A 400w HPS I'm looking at shows 55000lm / 400w = 137lm/w. A 38.2lm/w difference doesn't seem THAT significant when I've seen people saying a 300w QB is equivalent to a 600w HPS.